Time to face up to Mecca

Why wasn’t Saudi Arabia on Bush’s Axis of Evil?

In early 2002, President Bush made a speech that has come to define the
opening years of his presidency. He declared that a group of countries formed
an “Axis of Evil,” and that these regimes needed to be contained
by the free world.

While Bush clearly intended to prepare the ground for taking decisive action
against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, should it continue to flout
international demands, notable by its absence from the speech was any mention
of Saudi Arabia.

In the 9/11 attacks, which had taken place less than five months earlier,
most of the attackers had been Saudi, and the kingdom remained a major sponsor
of international terrorism and Islamic extremism, as well as home to one
of the world’s most repressive regimes.

This piece below, written the day after the “Axis of Evil”
speech, raised the question of why the Saudi regime continued to be given
such an easy ride by both western governments and the international media.

Since it was written, the American government has applied slightly more
pressure on Saudi Arabia both to liberalize and to crack down on terrorism.
The western media, too, has begun to cast a slightly more critical eye over
the Saudis – although any improvement in this respect still falls
far short of what is called for.

-- Tom Gross

THE ARTICLE: TIME TO FACE UP TO MECCA

IN his State of the Union
address last week, President Bush indicated where his war on terror is heading.
Iraq, Iran and North Korea “and their terrorist allies constitute
an axis of evil,” he declared. (North Korea, no doubt, was only included
as non-Islamic window dressing to appease the Arab League. It exports about
as much international terror as it does Internet start-up firms, which is
to say, not very much).

Bush received considerable praise from the pundits. Charles Krauthammer,
for example, congratulated him on an “astonishingly bold address”
which was “about preventing the next Sept. 11.” The prime target,
it was generally agreed, would be Iraq.

Yet, it has been clear since Sept. 11 – and actually since well before
then – that if America wants to prevent a major terrorist onslaught
there is one government above all others that must be reformed or replaced.
And it is not that of Saddam, but the House of Saud.

The Saudi regime – not merely its exiled son, Osama Bin Laden –
bears a major share of the responsibility for international terrorism. Further
acts of terror against Americans of the kind seen in Africa, Yemen, New
York and Washington, will likely follow unless some serious pressure is
placed on Riyadh, both to stop sponsoring Islamic extremists, and to allow
moderates some significant role in government.

The Saudis aid terrorism both directly and indirectly. On the direct level,
they fund (at government and at private levels) Islamic terrorist groups
throughout the world. For example, evidence uncovered in Afghanistan by
British and American intelligence officers clearly implicates a number of
leading Saudis, some of them members of the royal family, in the funding
of al-Qaeda.

ATTEMPT TO BLOW UP AN AMERICAN AIRLINES JET

The Saudi government is also the chief financial backer of the Palestinian
terror group Hamas. It was members of Hamas who taught shoe bomber Richard
Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines jet, how to dry the
explosive triacetone triperoxide, and mold it into shoes and belts. He received
this instruction when he visited Gaza last June.

In addition to providing support for terrorist groups, the Saudis have
helped to shape those groups’ ideology by exporting an extreme form
of Islamist philosophy.

A Saudi multi-millionaire in exile

The Saudis are also responsible for terror on an indirect level. By refusing
to permit any opposition to the regime other than that of the extremist
imams, who support Bin Ladenism, they have virtually forced young Saudis
who want to express their opposition to the ruling family’s brutal,
corrupt ways into the arms of those imams. The result – al Qaeda –
merely mirrors their own lack of respect for life and humanity.

These extremists will eventually overthrow the regime if it doesn’t
reform. Signs of dissent are growing. Just before Christmas, for example,
1,000 young men were reported to have rioted in Jeddah.

The Saudi regime regularly dishonors the moderate Islamic tradition with
its beheadings, amputations and floggings. Its appalling treatment of women
(the religious police patrol the streets with electric camel prods looking
for women exposing a little too much under their chadors), the vile anti-Semitism
and Holocaust denial that permeate the state-controlled media, and the general
lack of tolerance for Christians and Jews – in all these respects,
the Saudis are worse than Iran and Iraq.

When it comes to inciting Islamic extremism, too, the Saudi record is in
many respects worse than Iraq or Iran. It is no accident that the Saudis
enjoyed warm relations with the Taliban long after Teheran broke ties. As
Abdullah Al Refaie, editor-in-chief, of the Saudi paper Al Muslimoon, put
it: “The Iranian claim that the Taliban have discredited Islam is
simply not true. The Taliban, in fact, have a good record of behaving as
faithful and moderate Muslims.”

HANGING A MIDDLE-AGED BRITISH MAN FROM THE CEILING

The Saudi regime’s brutal record of torture is ignored by the West
– even when Britons, Belgians, and Canadians are the victims, as was
the case last year. As the British media revealed last month, during a 67-day
period of torture, Saudi police hung from the ceiling a middle-aged British
man who was being held on trumped-up charges, beat him with a pickaxe handle,
and threatened to have his wife repeatedly gang-raped until he confessed.

And yet the Saudi government is often described by American media and politicians
as “moderate” and “our partners,” and is subject
to much flattery from American and British halls of government. As is the
case with the Palestinian Authority, reports about the true extent of the
awfulness of the Saudi regime are largely ignored in the western media,
creating a dangerously misleading impression. Last week, for example, the
New York Times sub-headlined its news interview with Crown Prince Abdullah,
the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, “Dispensing wisdom, receiving
praise.”

Western governments have spent far too long propping up the regime in Riyadh,
as they have the one in Gaza, on the principle that the alternative would
be worse. But in fact there are plenty of moderate voices, among both the
Saudis and the Palestinians, who are desperate to find Western support but
are too terrified to speak out against their native regimes.

The New York Times on Saudi ruler Abdullah:
“Dispensing wisdom, receiving praise”

To say that the Saudis have been less than fully cooperative in the war
on terrorism would be an understatement. The lack of meaningful criticism
or rebuke from the US to Riyadh for the fact that 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers
were Saudis (and at least one entered the US on a Saudi diplomatic passport)
– a fact that the Saudis only acknowledged this week – that
over 100 of the 158 detainees being held in US custody at Guantanamo Bay
are Saudis, that 240 of the 250 al-Qaeda prisoners Pakistan is holding are
Saudis – this is surely one of the main reasons why the Saudi ruling
class are continuing to fund al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups.

Citing Western intelligence sources, Turkish, German and British newspapers
all last month reported that Saudi intelligence is currently financing the
relocation of thousands of Al Qaeda insurgents to Lebanon, the West Bank
and Gaza. The German daily Die Welt reported last Wednesday that Saudi officials
have helped place many of them in the Ein Hilwe Palestinian refugee camp
in Lebanon, and plan to finance their relocation to territory controlled
by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. (Not unrelated, Die Welt
also reported that it was Saudi intelligence that paid Iran $10 million
to buy the weapons for the Palestinian Authority that were captured by Israel
in the Red Sea on January 3.)

Indeed it is the Saudis, not the Iraqis, who one way or another leave their
fingerprints on virtually every major development among Muslim terrorists.
Take, for example, the recent use of women suicide bombers against Israeli
civilians. The Islamic authorities in Gaza have so far ordered only men,
not women, to blow up Israeli teenagers. The Palestinians behind these recent
female attacks (only one of which was “successful”) cite as
their inspiration last August’s fatwa issued by the Saudi High Islamic
Council exhorting women to become suicide bombers.

THE TWIN TOWERS: “CENTER OF USURY AND MONEY LAUNDERING”

Even with the Taliban’s collapse, the ideological justification for
the September 11 attacks (and of similar future acts) continues among Saudis.
For example, Saudi Sheikh Safar Abd Al-Rahman Al-Hawali, as quoted in Al-Hayat,
a London-based Arabic daily, on January 13, 2002, said: “Since when
is the Pentagon ‘innocent’? The famous American intellectual
Gore Vidal himself called it ‘Hell and a nest of Satans’...
[It is] a den of spies and a Mafia nest.” He went on to describe the
World Trade Center as “the center of usury and money laundering.”

The Twin Towers are no more. Sheikh Ali bin Khdheir:
“It is permissible to kill… non-combatants”

And here is Sheikh Ali bin Khdheir (a Yemenite who is funded from Saudi
sources), again speaking after Sept. 11: “It is permissible to kill
the combatants among them, as well as those who are non-combatants, for
example the aged man, the blind man, and the dhimmi, as the clerics agree.”

Former CIA Director James Woolsey is virtually alone among American officials
in stating what should be obvious to everybody: Saudi Arabia, he said last
month, “deserves a very large part of the blame for Sept. 11.”

It is constantly argued that if the Saudi monarchy were to fall, the successor
regime would merely be more extreme and anti-Western. Such thinking also
led Bush Sr. to try and keep the Soviet regime in power in the dying days
of communism. Yet there are moderate Saudis. Some come from within the regime,
such as King Fahd’s half-brother, Prince Talal, now 73, who spent
many years in exile for trying to persuade his fellow royals to shed their
despotic ways, and only last week renewed his call for the modernization
of Saudi institutions.

Others are from the middle classes, such as Dr. Sahr Muhammad Hatem of
Riyadh. Unable to voice her criticism inside the country, she wrote a letter
to a London-based Arabic newspaper on December 12, 2001. Under the title
“Our Culture of Demagogy Has Engendered bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and
Their Ilk,” she wrote: “The mentality of each one of us was
programmed upon entering school as a child, [to believe] that … anyone
who is not a Muslim is our enemy, and that the West means enfeeblement,
licentiousness, lack of values, and even Jahiliya [a term used to describe
the backward pre-Islamic era] itself. Anyone who escapes this programming
in school encounters it at the mosque, or through the media or from the
preachers lurking in every corner.”

Dr Hatem has received much praise from other Saudis. In the future, is
the US going to support those who agree with her, or is it going to continue
to prop up the unsavory regime that continues to govern Riyadh? The regime
can be pressured. It needs to sell oil more than the US needs to buy it.
And it isn’t just oil that it sends abroad. It also exports hate –
the hatred of America.

(Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday
Telegraph and the New York Daily News.)